Urban Tattoo: Scalable Urban Infrastructure for Human-Machine Cohabitation

What sort of new mobility infrastructure can help sustain public sector participation/operation and maximize public interest and safety?

With advancements in autonomous technology, automobile makers and tech companies are focusing on reinventing the automobile by increasing its computational capability and sensor systems. Due to strict road safety regulations, this vehicle-centric, inside-out approach, however, may take years to materialize and it may restrict "autonomy" to select vehicles, limiting its impact on street safety and socio-economy. In addition, while full-autonomy (stage-5) may be valuable in a low-density, suburban, or intercity-travel context, it is likely to be redundant in the urban environment where supporting infrastructure, data, and navigational instructions can be shared cheaply and rapidly.

In contrast to the vehicle-centric approach, our research focuses on exploring ways to offload the often heavy computational requirement from the vehicle through affordable interventions in the street infrastructure, such as providing low-cost human-machine readable traffic signs and urban markers.

With the support of a new genre of smart urban infrastructure, we believe this "autonomy-lite" approach will soon allow lightweight autonomous vehicles to be widely deployed and navigate smoothly in most urban environments.